2008 Acura TL Type S

May 21, 2008

Transcript

>> Brian Cooley: To me the '08 Acura TL Type-S looks like someone took a Lincoln LS and DC Whitney Cadillac and went nuts. That's it let's go inside and check the tech.
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>> Now inside our TL Type-S is a different story. It's an attractive cabin. I like the quality of the materials certainly at this price point which is more than I can say for this damn thing. That display has been around as long as CNET's been doing car reviews and its just getting long in the tooth. As you can see we do have live traffic on this car which is something Acura has had from a very early point. And so on all the routes here, you might see yellow and green lines those are what give you the live traffic information. This car gets it from an XM satellite that's the NAV traffic service which is an additional cost on top of your XM radio. Overall the screen is a generous size. It's an 8 inch I believe. It's a touch screen but only sometimes which is my next gripe. You have to use this stupid thing. These mushroom controllers make me crazy. This could be the worst one I've ever seen. To make matters worse at night it completely disappears. And of course your audio settings are over here which brings me to what the audio system consists of. A lot, and on the Type-S just about everything I'm going to show you is standard AM FM of course, no HD radio yet. Disc player is interesting. Now there you've got an MP3 WMA CD compatible 6 disc internal changer. It also plays DVD audio. Also on board standard is XM radio, no Sirius, this is a Honda Acura product after all. Over here is the Aux button that switches on whatever is in the Aux jack which is a standard dumb mini down here in the console but again that's not a bad option for great compatibility with just about any device. Now here is the one that sticks in my craw. Yeah, I would love to have some spy cams in their dealerships. When the dealer gets in there with the car and says, "You know a lot of folks have a cassette library and they're frustrated not being able to play them in the competing cars from Infinity and Lexus." No they don't, my cassettes got thrown away years ago. This is stupid and a waste of real estate. Now in general this car has a lot of tech in it as you can tell. There's also a rear view camera when you put this thing in reverse you don't often see manual transmissions in cars of this class. We do have one on our TL Type-S. It does have the worst clutch I've driven on a Japanese car in quite a while. And the TL Type-S has a great motor. It's bigger than the engine in the standard TL. That's a 3.2 liter V6 and this guy aside having the bigger displacement also has bigger valves and a free flow exhaust. The problem is torque steer, tons of it. This car is embarrassing in terms of torque steer. It feels like an 80's car. When car makers still didn't quite know how to give a lot of power to the front wheels and not have it snap the wheel out of your hands. Real disappointing. Oh, come here, very impressive breaks in the front of this car. They are Brembo calipers 4 pot units they are grabbing on the 12.2 inch disc rotors. A little more garden variety set up in the back but this car knows how to stop, big wheels of course. There's an option for high performance tires on the TL Type-S. Beware if those are the real gummy Z rated tires, you probably can't afford to keep a car this heavy in tires at that compound. And if you can why are you buying an Acura? Okay lets price our TL Type-S with the 6 speed manual, which actually doesn't matter which transmission you've got because as I mentioned earlier same price for the 5 automatic or the 6 manual gear box. 38,940 and there is really no decision to be made on tech options. They are all included at the Type-S level.
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